Again, a year earlier, he had told in his Passage to India how he was ready to set forth upon the Unknown Sea.
And now, with his labours unaccomplished, his heart stricken and heavy with bereavement, joylessly he seemed to hear the weighing of the anchor and to feel his ship already setting forth. Where now was the old exaltation of spirit; where the eager longing for Divine adventure with which hitherto he had always contemplated death?
Now sorrow claimed him, and for a season he lost hold of joy and faith. He was as one abandoned by the Giver of Life, and isolated from Love. Thus deserted, he became utterly exhausted of vitality. It is as though for a time his soul had parted from his bodily life, and yet the life in the body must go on. If death had come now he would not have refused it; but his hour was not yet. Neither living nor dying, through the sad, dark days of long protracted illness and solitude, of physical debility and mental bewilderment—as it were, through year-long dream-gropings—he waited.
The light of his life seemed suddenly to have gone out.[535] Near as he had dwelt to death, in the tragedy of the war-hospitals and in the habit of his thought, he was wholly unprepared for the death of his mother.
He was a man upon whose large harmonious and resonant nature every tragic experience struck out its fullest note. Philosophy and religion were his, if they were any man’s; but he was not one of those who escape experience in the byways of abstraction. He took each blow full in his breast.
His mother was dead; that was the physical wrench which crippled him body and soul. He could not accustom himself to her death and departure.[536] He could not understand it, nor why he was so stricken by it. It seemed as though in her life his mother had given to her son something that was essential to that soul-consciousness in which he had lived, and that her death had broken his own life asunder, so that it was no longer harmonious and triumphant.
His mother was dead, and he was alone in Camden. Not perhaps actually alone, for his new sister, George’s wife, was always kindly; and so, indeed, was George himself. But spiritually he was alone. He had lost something, it seems, of the spiritual companionship which had made the world a home to him wherever he went. And now the human comrades who had come so close were far away. Washington and New York were equally out of reach; and he had lost O’Connor. Letters, indeed, he had; but they did not make up to him for the daily magnetic contact with the men and women whom he loved. Touch and presence meant more to him than to others, and these he had lost.
He was, then, very much alone; bereft at once, so it would seem, of the material and the spiritual consciousness of fellowship; standing wholly by himself, in the attitude of that live-oak he had once wondered at in Louisiana, because it uttered joyous leaves of dark green though it stood solitary.[537] He was like a tree blasted by lightning; yet he too continued to put forth his leaves one and one, letters of cheery brief words to his old comrades, and especially to Pete.[538] He was an old campaigner worsted at last, standing silently at bay; only determined, come what might, that he would not grumble or complain.
His circumstances were not all gloomy. Through the summer of 1873, Whitman remained with his brother, at number 322, Stevens Street, in the pleasant room his mother had occupied upon the first floor. Around him were the old familiar objects dear to him from childhood.